A Ghazal of the Body
She never asked him to use the scalpel or the bone saw.
She asked him how the body worked, and why.
Her scars, unerasable, contoured as heiroglyphs,
only interpretable by the lamplight of libraries.
It's true, she buried herself many times, and paid
for each rebirth in charcoal and in blood.
The best part of a poem, she knows, is always the same:
any time the surgeon is made to speak her name.